Lullaby
by isawet
Summary: Modern Hospital AU, Clarke/Lexa. Domesticity, issues, romance.
1. Chapter 1

There's a painting Clarke did in college that hangs in your shared apartment, over the table where you eat dinner when her (your) friends come over, where you and Raven get too competitive over poker, where Octavia and Lincoln fleece everyone at beer pong when you drink like you're still in college and they pass out on the sofa, the counters, the floors, the balcony. You'd insisted on hanging it there, where you can see it when you come in the door, see it when you stand at the stove, see it out of the corner of your eye when you sit on the couch and watch television. Clarke put up pictures across the walls: her father, her mother, Octavia and Lincoln, Raven, Bellamy, Monty, Jasper. Clarke has many friends, too many you feel sometimes when they are all in your space, _talking_ , but you understand. Who could feel Clarke's warmth, experience her brilliance, touch her life, and not want to stay?

"Are you sure?" she'd asked you, brow furrowed when you stepped back to see if the painting hung straight. "It was like… a generic exercise. An urn. So boring." You knew she thinks it's boring because her art now is explosive, shadows and bursts of color, imaginative and otherworldly. There's never been anything generic about Clarke.

"It's a carafe," you corrected, and you had to smile, because of course she doesn't know the difference between an urn and a carafe. You tilted your head and frowned. Not quite straight.

"I think I have another of a fruit bowl," Clarke'd said, curling her hands over your hips and tugging you back against her, gentle.

"No," you'd said, and frowned again, because you've never been able to articulate everything you feel, not ever, and it never felt like so much of a failure as it does when you're with Clarke.

"Okay," she'd said, indulgent of your oddities, and she'd kissed you under your jaw, to make you shiver. You laid her out on the table, knelt between the soft apex of her thighs and took her apart with your tongue, until she shuddered, squeaked, too sensitive and urging you away with a hand tangled in your hair.

/

You lost your parents first, and sometimes Clarke sings in the shower and you linger at the sink to brush your teeth because you love her voice, humming above the water, _the first cut is the deepest_ and you have to smile because she's so country sometimes, in her plaid and her hats and her flannels, rolling down the windows to feel the wind in her hair and blast Sheryl Crow and Shania Twain. You lost your parents first, but it was the littlest hurt. You don't remember them, after all, and it's possible they're still alive, somewhere.

Clarke tells you about her dad very late at night, curled up in your arms in the bed you share together, in the apartment you bought together, Clarke telling the realtor she loves the windows while you stand quiet at the door and love the way the sun lights up her hair, the curve of her smile; golden. You hold her very close and wish you had words to ease her pain, sweeping careful fingers under her eyes and carrying her tears away from her skin. "I think he would have liked you," Clarke whispers and you wrap yourself around her, try to fold her into yourself-your armor is cracked and worn but it's strong, and you want to tuck Clarke inside it next to your heart.

/

You'd known you were in trouble when both of your schedules had lined up at the hospital and during the eight hour break between brutal shifts you'd staggered into the on-call barracks and squished yourself into one of the tiny, thin, uncomfortable mattresses with your feet hanging off and the metal rails digging into your skin, the crick sharp in your neck, all just so you can feel her pressed against you, snoring in your ear.

/

You have brunch with Abby every other Sunday when your schedule allows in the house Clarke grew up in, her art framed across the walls, her father smiling from the mantle. You care about Abby insomuch that Clarke cares for her, so her opinion of you is important. The first time you could hardly choke down your food, drinking orange juice even though you hate it to give you something to do with your hands, your mouth. You sit in the porch swing and rock it with your toes while they catch up in the kitchen, and you like it best when Clarke settles in next to you, your hands tangled.

"Maybe I could meet your parents," Clarke says one Sunday, cautiously timid in a way that's unlike her.

"I don't have any," you murmur. Her hand tightens around yours, and you want to meet her halfway, you want her to know you, so you admit: "I was given up very young." Your mother had put you in a pink dress and your father had dropped you off at the preschool birthday party of a classmate, and neither of them ever came back. You remember how much you disliked the dress more than you remember either of their faces, and you feel guilty when Clarke wraps you in an embrace, because you don't think of them often, and when you do it doesn't hurt you much. Not the way Costia hurts you, Anya. Gustus. You're not brave enough to tell her, because you want to stay in the warm circle of her arms.

/

Clarke takes you to meet her father, and you google flowers because you're not sure what else to do. Her gaze is warm when she sees your arms full of carnations, pink and white, a single violet tulip. You've never met Jacob Griffin but he gave the world Clarke and you are so, so grateful. You listen to Clarke introduce you and leave your regards at the foot of his gravestone: gratitude, friendship, faithfulness. You hold her hand while you walk away.

/

Anya had been the one to call you the Commander first. You could use a nickname, she argues, to keep the interns in check. When you are on shift you are head of the ER unit and you enjoy the challenge, thinking on your feet, problem solving as you go. Anya's the one who broke into your studio apartment with takeout when you'd been studying too long, Anya's the one who took the bottle out of your hand after Costia, Anya stitched you up after they brought you in after the accident, when you stared at nothing, stuck in the moment just before the car exploded around you, Costia's soft eyes looking into your own.

/

You'd met Clarke on a consult, in the elevator, escorting a patient to surgery. You'd rattled off vitals and prognosis with the ease of practice and handed over the chart. It was a child, and you are always a little softer towards them. You like children, because they're easy. All you read and see on television says that children are so complicated, and maybe they are; but you've always found that all they want is your attention, your caring. You don't care well, but children understand respectful touches and a gentled voice so much more easily than adults do. You patted him on the wrist and promised him Dr. Griffin would take good care of him, and after your shift is over you go to visit him, solemnly admire the neon green he'd picked for his cast.

"You're different than I expected," she'd said to you, both waving as he skips away to claim his candy from a nurse.

"What did you expect?"

"They say you're cold."

"I am," you say, truthful. You hear the whispers: a hospital is more like high school than your own high school ever was, and you can't help but agree with many of them: you don't care about people the way you should, you're professional but rarely have a kind word for the patients, you're good at your job but shitty with friendship and camaraderie. It's funny, you think, that she chose that one to disclose because you feel cold often. In your most poetic moments you think Costia took all the warmth out of your blood with her when she died.

"I don't think so," she'd said, and took you down to the mess for a coffee so subtly you don't even notice it was an invitation until you're sitting across from her, your hands folded stiffly in your lap. She chats with you about work and her friends and tells you a story about the newest intern fucking up that makes your lips tug upwards, however hard you try to keep them flat, and when she pushes her coffee across the table you take it, sipping. It slips down your throat into your belly, trailing fire like lit gasoline. You feel warm.

/

The first time you loved her with your body you were both fully clothed and you're drunk from a single whiskey sour and overflowing with how she makes you feel, pressing her against the cold brick wall of the bar, Octavia and Lincoln dancing inside without you, your fingers moving inside her while she shakes apart around you. You make out in the back of a cab like the drunk teenagers neither of you are, and she pulls you up to her apartment and you can't wait so you have her again against the closed door of her bedroom, kneeling to fill your mouth with how she smells, how she tastes, how she sounds when she keens.

She lays you out on her bed and you tremble when she runs her fingers up your bare legs, surrounded by her clothes and her sheets and her knick-knacks tumbling off the nightstand because she was so eager to cover your skin with hers. You don't let her take off your shirt and she doesn't push you, dotting your thighs and your hips with bruises from her teeth, _trochanter, femoral head, pubic symphysis_.

/

The balcony is your favorite place in your apartment, after your bed when Clarke's in it, and sometimes when you wake in the middle of the night, your scars aching, and can't go back to sleep you slide out of the sheets and the lingering warmth of her body and smoke a cigarette, watching the end flare when you inhale, blowing smoke out with a soft sigh. You like it best when it's so quiet you can hear the paper burn. Costia had smoked, and you keep a faintly crushed pack of menthols at the bottom of your drawer full of gloves and scarves and winter hats.

"You know I hate that," she whispers one night, voice sleep rough, and shivers when she joins you.

"Yes," you agree, and then: "sorry, love." It slips out because you were thinking of Costia, and sleepy as Clarke is she squints at you, surprised. She takes the cigarette from your mouth and inhales lazily, blowing it through her nose like a dragon. When she puts it back into your mouth your lips brush her skin, gentle. "I-" You frown, but it's otherwordly this time of night in the dark, the roads quiet under your feet, all other life sounds very far away, and it feels easy to tell her when you're not quite sure if you're dreaming or not. "I lost someone, once."

She takes your hand in hers, so careful with you the way she always is when you curl up into yourself. "I know."

You tell her about Costia, how you met in high school when your clothes smelled like wet mold from the garbage bag you kept them in as you moved from home to home, how she never let anyone but you touch her hair, how you lived together in shitty apartments and borrowed too much money from her parents and crumpled under the weight of your student loans and scholarship requirements and promised her, every single day, that you'd take care of her as soon as you got your first residency.

"I lost her," you say, and Clarke squeezes your fingers but doesn't move closer, and you ache with how well she knows you. You tell her about that night, how you took her out on a date to a restaurant you couldn't really afford because you knew she deserved it, how you remember her lipstick on the wineglass, how she laughed and teased you while you drove home, her hand on your knee. You were thinking about how you much you wanted to kiss her when a black sedan ran a red light and crumpled the used volvo you bought with your first paycheck like a tin can.

You pull your sleeves up and rub at your scars, dotted across the pale skin of your inner arms, glass and metal gouging you when you tried to crawl to her, your mind cataloguing her injuries even as you begged her to breathe, listening to the blood bubble in her lungs. There are matching scars on your torso, cutting through the first tattoo you ever got high on your chest, _manubrium, costal cartilage_.

"I'm sorry," Clarke says, and kisses the inside of your elbow, the delicate bones in your wrist, _lunate, hamate, capitate_. You pull her close and dip your head into the hollow of her throat so you can feel her pulse flutter against your skin, proof of life against your lips.

/

The day after your first date with Clarke you go to see Gustus. You frown when you see the lawn overgrown and hear the door squeaking in its hinges, his hands shake when he lifts the kettle.

"I met someone," you tell him while they wait for the tea to steep.

"Hm," he says, disapproving, and you hate that it affects you.

"She's a doctor," you say, and try describe the strength she has, how life knocks her around and she keeps getting back up, keeps caring. She is stronger than you, because she never shut herself down, kept reaching out. "She is so light," you tell him. "She elevates herself."

"I only want you to be safe," he says, and you drink your tea and feel frustrated towards him for the first time since you were his student, a rebellious teen convinced you'd never make anything out of yourself other than another unclaimed body in the city morgue.

"She is important to me," you say stiffly, and don't kiss his cheek when you leave.

You get the call two days later: heart attack, in his bed. You claim the body and pay for the cremation, hike the largest mountain in the nearest national park and spread his ashes into the wind with your calves still burning, your chest still heaving. You miss the next three dates with Clarke and don't respond to her texts. You avoid her in the halls and after two weeks she stops calling.

/

You eat lunch on the roof even though it's bitterly cold out and Raven of all people is the one who finds you out, bitching about how she climbed the stairs in her brace and how the cold makes the metal freeze against her skin.

"No one asked you to come," you say dispassionately, and Raven throws a french fry at you.

"Just because you've made Clarke cry doesn't mean everyone hates you," she says. "Only most of everyone."

You frown deeply into your thermos. "Clarke… cried?"

"Cries. Present tense." Raven eats her sandwich, sighing. "What's the deal, Lexa? I know you're not this much of a bitch. Intimacy issues? Abandonment issues? Daddy-"

"I am finished here," you say, and stand abruptly. You're halfway down the stairs when you sigh and go back up, help Raven up and let her bitch at you while she limps down the steps, refusing your aid for the sake of her pride.

/

You visit Anya's grave-Costia is buried near her parents, half a country away-and frown. You try to talk to her and only get out a few stiff sentences before you give up. There is nothing of Anya here, nothing of her fire and her grit and her knife's edge smile. You don't have any flowers because Anya hated them, a waste of money just for something that would die in the span of two or three days. You sit above her body and pour half a beer into the grass and the dirt, leave the bottle leaned against the tombstone.

/

You go to Clarke's apartment with a speech prepared on index cards, although you're hopeful you won't have to reference them. She lets you in without argument, which was the first five cards, so you mentally skip ahead. "Clarke," you says, clearing your throat, "I-" you sputter to a stop, swallowing, and get caught up in her bright blue eyes, vast and catching, like a riptide, filled with hurt that you caused. You open your mouth again, to start over, and sob instead. It shocks her out of her stance against her wall, arms crossed and angry, and she comes towards you.

You back away, fighting each sob as it rises in your chest and losing. "I-" You'll try again tomorrow, you think, and try to retreat. Your mind is on how fast you can get to your car, where you can deal with whatever's happening in your mind and your body alone, but Clarke grabs you in your distraction, dragging you to her sofa. You pull away from her hands, hunching in on yourself, and stuff a fist into your mouth.

"Lexa," she murmurs, soft, and lays a hand on your back, rubbing. It's too much, and you cringe away. It takes five minutes, but you get your breath back, shuddering, and she's still sitting there, watching you with loving eyes.

"I'm sorry," you say, clearing your throat. The words you practiced in the mirror that morning come back to you. "I treated you poorly, and there's no-" you have to pause to sniffle, "-excuse, but I hope you will accept-"

"Lexa. Stop." You blink at her, owlish. "What are you doing?"

You fumble in your pocket for your index cards. "I-" You push them at her and she takes them, shuffling through, bewildered. "I practiced," you confess lamely.

She smiles, which is even more confusing, because you're pretty sure she's still angry with you. "Tell me the truth."

"I did practice," you mutter, but you know what she means. "Someone died," you say, weary, because every landmark in your life can also be marked by a loss. "I… dealt with it poorly."

"I'm sorry," she says, and when she touches you again you curl into her, a leaf reaching for the sun.

"You should be angry."

"I am. But I'm also sorry."

"Thank you," you say, and shift awkwardly. You reach tentatively for the index cards, still held loosely in her grasp, and she draws them further from you.

"Oh no, I'm keeping these. Possibly forever. I may frame them."

"Clarke," you say, but you can't keep the smile from blooming on your face.

/

Raven and Octavia take turns calling your phone while you're on shift and leaving you voicemails, dramatic readings of the speech you'd agonized over. Sometimes one of them takes on the role of Clarke, swooning loudly in the background. You play them back for Clarke during your makeup dates, where you do things you'd sworn never to do for forgiveness, like dancing all dressed up, cooking for her, posing for her to draw you. She giggles in big peals of laughter to hear them and you can admit (only to her, sworn secrecy), that they are amusing.

/

It is Clarke's birthday and you're frustrated. You don't know what to buy her, what to say, where to go. You try to interrogate Octavia, and then Raven, and finally in desperation, Lincoln, who is the only one nice enough not to laugh in your face.

You sit up at night and try to write how you feel about her, thinking it'll be easier in a letter, fumbling to hide it when she wanders out, barefoot and pouting that you left her alone in bed. Your written words are just as inadequate as your spoken ones were, and you shred draft after draft, your frustration mounting.

You take Clarke to her favorite restaurant, order her favorite foods. You don't order wine because you're drunk off her smiles and her leg pressed against yours under the table, and because she never drinks wine anyway. The big birthday bash is scheduled for two days later; Raven has dropped hints that the cake will be inappropriate. Tonight is for you and Clarke alone, together, and you take her to your apartment with nerves jangling under your skin. You'd filled your bedroom with flowers before you'd left to pick her up: ambrosia, camellia, aster: love, love love.

You undress her and mouth every inch as it's revealed: her shoulders, her ribs, her navel, the inside of her knees and her ankles. She lets you lie her down and cherish her with your hands on her back, digging out the aches from 52 hour shifts of standing on her feet, 10 hour surgeries, the crick in her neck from trees on trees of paperwork. You kiss between each vertebrae: _cervical, thoracic, lumbar_ , until she flips you, impatient.

"It's my birthday," she says, tugging at your top, and you are helpless beneath her as you always are, your back arching as you marvel that she knows your body the way she does, how to make you gasp and moan and beg her in every twitch of your fingers and quiver of your voice: _Clarke, Clarke, Clarke_.

/

You go running every morning. You'd gotten Clarke to accompany you only once, in the early stages of dating where you're so eager to spend time with one another you try to partake in each other's hobbies, and she'd hated every second. She'd flopped on the first bench she'd found and refused to move again, gasping, and you'd run an eight minute mile to the nearest coffee shop and back, fed her donut holes and laughed when Clarke licked powdered sugar off your fingers.

So you run by yourself, your music blotting out the world around you, and take meandering routes through the neighborhood. On Saturdays, laundry day, you slide into the bed, shining with sweat, and rub yourself on her while she groans and shoves at you, until you slide a knee between her thighs and rock, and then she comes awake under you, hungry and eager and cursing the strong elastic of your sports bra.

/

Clarke doesn't drink. It takes you a while to notice, because you don't drink much yourself and neither of you have the time to party regularly. But you do notice eventually, when you go to the big parties her friends throw and lean on the walls, breaking only to chat with Raven or Octavia, let Lincoln pull you into a drinking game. Clarke cheers everyone on and always has a cup in her hand, and slowly you notice it's always full of sparkling water and lime, or ice and cranberry juice. It's an observation that cuts and you pay attention, when you go out to a bar and she comes back with something alcoholic for you and something virgin for herself. It's interesting but you two are in such a good place right now, just moved in together, and you're too scared to ruin it. You take the rum that someone gave you at some point that you keep behind the olive oil in the pantry and pour it down the sink, toss the bottle into the recycle bin, and don't think much about it again.

Raven's the one who spills the beans. She tells you she's throwing a party for Clarke at your apartment and orders you to go pick up the cake. When you pay you flick open the the box and recognize the look of it, the quote, the Roman numeral. Five years sober, you think, and count backwards, trying to match things Clarke's told you to a timeline.

You go to your apartment and sigh when Octavia makes you help her hang streamers, standing on a stool while Octavia prefers to sit on Lincoln's shoulders, and you laugh when Raven hits herself in the face with the freezer door, slipping on an ice cube and shrieking, and have to admit to yourself, however grudging, that they are your friends and you care about them.

You draw the line at hiding behind the couch and shouting surprise. Instead you lean against the wall and watch the love bloom over Clarke's face when she sees the people she loves the most all in one place, all to celebrate her. You like to think it's sharpest when she looks at you.

/

You wake up from the familiar dream with a start and can't go out to smoke because there's your love and your friends snoring out from your bed to the sliding door in the living room, so you stretch out, cracking your spine, and roll over to smash your face into her chest. She snorts, awakened by your movements, and slides a hand through your hair. "I don't know why I didn't tell you," she admits quietly. "Don't be mad." Your dream fades like mist, leaving only with how her eyes are squinty because she's tired, how her lipstick is smeared around her mouth because she forgot to wipe it off before falling into bed with you. You want to tell her you love that painting of hers from college because she made it with her own hands and it reminds you of yourself, how you swallow every feeling Clarke inspires until they overflow like a carafe when you kiss her and you hope she understands why it's so difficult to say you love her even though it comes easily to her, love yous whenever you talk on the phone, little post its attached to the fridge. You hope she knows that you hate that you can't reciprocate, and that you tell her you love her with every paint you go out of your way to buy her, when you ride the elevator up to give her pastries to eat between patients, when you sleep next to her and feel her breathe against you.

"I am not mad," you whisper. "I am happy." Her hand stills; she is surprised. So are you. She pulls you up into a kiss, morning breath and all, and it's broken only when Raven and Octavia begin bickering in the hall. She pokes you in the ribs and you roll over, tucking the duvet over your head. "They're your children before sunrise," you say, and when she laughs your heart beats: too fast, too big, too full.


	2. Chapter 2

**1\. when you really met**

You were volunteering the summer before your senior year, doing the grunt bitch work for everyone in the hospital and hoping it'll turn into a job after graduation. The ambulances roar in with a scream and there was a pile-up just a half-hour earlier and the ER is jammed up so they sent you out to help wheel the new patients in.

"Drunk driver," the EMT tells you, rattling stats off. You catalogue the numbers automatically. "Two more behind me," the EMT continues, "driver will walk away with a scratch; this one's a goner." You look at the goner, see a beautiful girl with smooth dark skin and her curly hair matted with blood. You hook the chart to the side of the gurney and wheel her to a trauma room. A nurse grabs the sleeve of your scrub shirt.

"OR 3," she orders, and pushes you into an elevator with another gurney, another beautiful girl in a back brace and a spine stabilizer. She's awake.

"Hey," you say, soothing and comforting as you can. You remember how out of it you'd been when you woke up in the hospital after the accident, your last memory Raven screaming and Finn's blank eyes. "You're going to be okay." The girl's fingers twitch against the metal railing.

"Costia," she croaks.

"It's okay," you repeat, for lack of anything else to say. You don't know this girl but you recognize the choked look on her face, the loss.

"Costia," she says again, and tries to move. You stabilize her immediately, and slip your hand in yours. She locks her eyes with yours and you're caught. They're brilliantly green; her right pupil is fixed and blown. Concussion at best, brain bleed at worst.

"Sorry," you say quietly. "I'm sorry." Her eyes roll back, fluttering shut, and the elevator dings. You pass her off to the surgical team and go back to the emergency room.

/

You don't think about her again, the girl with the broken eyes, until she tells you about Costia on the balcony of the apartment you share, her hand tight and tense in yours. You kiss her and she tastes like cigarettes and grief and you have a flash of a thought: you're grateful Costia died, because otherwise you'd never know the curve of Lexa's smile, what her teeth feel like against your skin, the tangle of her hair in your fingers. You recoil from the thought, horrified, and after she falls asleep you slip out of bed and take the pack from where she thinks she's hidden it well under her scarves and chainsmoke your way through it alone. "Sorry," you say outloud to the girl you've met but never knew. _Mine_ your heart says fiercely, _she's mine_.

 **2\. you know she loves you**

Lexa is confident and professionally ambitious and focused, and when it's just her and you she's thoughtful and sweet and endlessly loving, and she thinks she hides her anxiety well but she happens to be almost hopelessly, adorably, transparent. You'd said _I love you_ first, after she'd taken you back to her apartment after a date. She'd kissed you while she fumbled with her key in the lock, and you both fell into her apartment, attached at the lips. You pushed her against the nearest wall and kissed her so thoroughly you were panting when you pulled away, your nose brushing hers, and you'd pulled in the breath she'd just exhaled and told her you loved her, the words slipping off your tongue before you can swallow them back.

You watched her face go slack, shocked, and you saw her eyes up slow and dark as she processed your words, the pupils dilating. She kissed you breathless again, surging her body against yours, stretching your bodies out on her hardwood floor next to the jumble of her shoes by the door, her body heavy on yours. You came with her name on your lips, shuddering, your back bowed, and felt her shake against your chest, tears on your collarbones.

She'd made you breakfast in her bed the next day and fed you cut up fruit with her own fingers, swiped powdered sugar across your nose and your cheekbones with little happy smiles. Underneath she thrums, nervous energy. You push her down and drop half a grape into her belly button, sucking it out while she peers at you, bemused, and you sit on her hips and eat toast, dropping buttery crumbs on her skin, her sheets, her floor, until she's soft and relaxed against you, smiling big and happy.

/

You get soppier, leaving her hearts in the mirror while she showers, post-its on the fridge when you have to leave before her, sleepy mumbles when she slips in bed behind you and draws you close.

/

"It doesn't bother you?" Raven asks during your shared lunch break, eating the roast beef sandwich Lexa's left saran wrapped in the fridge for you, layered with the expensive mustard she hates but you could (and do) eat with a spoon. "Because I'll fight her if you want me to." Raven brandishes a spork. "I'll kick her ass."

"I don't think you getting your ass kicked is going to help anything," you say, and dodge the cherry tomato she flings at you. "I think she's just… different. I don't mind." Raven's eyes widen and she jerks a finger across her throat, just as you hear the elevator ding.

Lexa's hand settles gently on your arm and she kisses you, mustard and all, and her eyes are incredibly soft and she's brought you the shockingly sweet coffee you like from the place across the street and she kisses you again, her nose wrinkled at the mustard, and you don't mind anything.

/

You've just had the worst argument you've ever had, worse than being too stressed and too tired or tripping over each other's shoes or putting the empty milk carton back in the fridge, worse because you haven't actually argued at all. She stood you up, won't answer your texts or your calls, adjusted her schedule so you hardly see her at work, sends the interns when she absolutely has to tell you something. It's everything everyone warned you about when you started dating her, that she's emotionally closed off and cold, and you refuse to throw yourself where you're not wanted so you go to a bar and call Octavia to pick you up before you can drink the shot that you ordered and cry in her lap on her couch while Lincoln makes you both hot chocolate.

/

She shows up on your doorstep, looking like shit, and you've just showered and your hair is a wet tangled mess and you're wearing a sweatshirt she'd left behind and if you had any dignity at all you never would have let her in but you'd seen her through the peephole and yanked the door open before you could think it all the way through.

She starts crying, her face crumpled in on itself and your anger and hurt don't seem as important anymore. You drag her to your couch and let her curl up into herself, protecting herself as best she can even now. She tells you quietly that she lost someone and you recognize that look in her eyes from the elevator years ago, her bloody hand slack against your latex gloves. She tries to apologize and you page through her stack of index cards, written out in carefully deliberate, impeccable handwriting, and you put them aside to wrap both of you in a blanket and cuddle her close.

Two weeks later and everything's mostly forgiven, and you're naked in her bed while she goes down to the Chinese place on the corner for takeout. Your sweat is dry and you're cold now, so you go to steal her sweats, because you like the way she licks her lips when she sees them on you, a little long in the leg and little tight around the thigh. You also want her wool socks, because they're amazing and you like to slide around in them because it's fun and it makes her smile. You drop them and grumble when they roll under the dresser, going down on all fours to fish them out. There are piles of index cards there, ripped in half, crumpled pieces of notebook paper, scritch scratch in her handwriting as she struggled to articulate how you make her feel. When you open the drawer for a top there's a thin stack of printouts hidden under the zipper hoodies she wears she goes running. You draw them out and they're apartment listings, with notes in Lexa's handwriting _Clarke likes windows_ and _extra room = studio space?_.

She comes through the door, calling out she's back and you kiss her so fast and so hard she loses her grip on the takeout, eggdrop soup splashing the walls. You fuck her boneless on the kitchen tile, relentless, making her beg and come twice before grinding out your own release slow and dirty on her thigh and when you finally roll off there's white rice crushed under where you pinned her arms and ordered her not to move. "I love you," you tell her, and watch her say it back in the way her eyes go soft and the way she yields to the close mouthed kiss you press against her chapped lips and the way she exhales, shaky when you touch her every time, like it shocks her to be loved by you.

 **3\. you knew anya**

Anya had been the resident in charge of you at your first internship.; She'd been terrifying and blunt and relentless, with rarely a kind word and never a praise, and you'd learned more from her than all four years of medical school combined. You think she might have hated you, thought you'd try to cruise on your mother's name and reputation, until she dragged you to the roof after you'd failed to resuscitate a nine year old boy, his dead eyes accusing as you noted his time of death: _why didn't you save me?_ , after his father crumpled against the wall, sliding down with his head in his hands and his mother sobbing in the rickety waiting room chair.

She'd propped you up in the sticky summer heat and made you recite the odds and the statistics until you accepted in your head, if not your heart, that you'd done everything you could have done. Then she split a cigarette and a smashed brown banana with you and pretended you weren't crying, until you could wipe your nose and your eyes off on your scrubs and go back to work.

You heard about her death a week after it happened, a meaningless, senseless loss, and lit a candle for her in the hospital chapel. You weren't her friend like some of the other doctors who petitioned to get something named after her and you weren't her family like Lexa, who still can't eat Anya's favorite food or watch her favorite movie without the shadow of grief weighing down on her shoulders, but you miss her. You miss her talent and her presence and her knowledge, and you miss the happiness she must have brought Lexa for Lexa to grieve her so deeply and fully, curled up away from you on bad nights until she makes herself get up again.

 **4\. your mother doesn't like her**

You drag Lexa to brunch with your mother and she eats everything your mother puts on the table with the grim determination of a soldier marching into battle, answering her questions with impeccable politeness and respect. She drinks half a pitcher of orange juice during the thinly veiled interrogation even though you know she hates it and she flees to the porch swing to give you time alone as soon as she can. You drop the dishes in the sink and notice that your mother has hidden the wine she usually keeps on the counter, like if you wanted to fall off the wagon you couldn't walk your own ass down to the corner store and buy a handle.

"She's not what I would have picked for you," your mother says, judgmental and faintly disapproving, and you warn her fiercely that if she ever hints so much at Lexa you'll go back to the strained gaping silence that existed between you after your father wasn't there to bridge your two personalities, too different and too similar all at once.

So every other Sunday you and Lexa go and your mother makes sure there's a full pitcher of orange juice because she mistakenly thinks Lexa likes it and Lexa talks at great length about the color wheel and postmodernist deconstructionism because she mistakenly thinks you got your love of art from your mother and when you get in the car Lexa exhales big and loud and you kiss her to get the orange juice taste out of her mouth and drive her home and make her something she likes to eat and sit on the couch under the same blanket and make out, goofy and too wet, and you tell her Abby likes her, definitely.

 **5\. you know when her birthday is**

Lexa opens to you like a pomegranate, you think, when you're post-coitally stupid and poetic, slow and messy and so sweet, revealing little bits of herself, her past like seeds against your searching fingers: she grew up in a series of homes, some okay, some indifferent, some that make you clench your nails into your palm in impotent rage, nowhere to direct it, no way to change it. You know she tries to only tell you the good memories-the time she went to the state fair and rode a roller coaster for the first time, the family that had a dog that slept on the foot of her bed and kept her toes warm. You treasure everything she tells you but it's the darker memories that feel the most intimate, Lexa whispering in the dark about how she got the fine scars on the outside of her right elbow, why she gets anxious when the pantry's empty and how the smell of eggs makes her nauseous.

She doesn't celebrate her birthday or even mention it at all and for the first year you don't push. For your birthday she wrangles for both of you to have the day off and spoils you rotten. She dotes on you and then takes you out to your favorite restaurant and back to her bedroom, full of flowers, worships your body with careful fingers. What you really want is to feel her naked against you and she gives you that too, smiling while she says your name like a ragged prayer.

/

You're driving slow and careful in the snow to Lincoln and Octavia's housewarming party when she sucks in a sharp breath, her hand flying out to cross your chest, and you turn-you're looking at her when the SUV hits you, spinning on black ice. Your car crumples: you hear the metal screaming and the glass shattering, and the slam impact of your car into the roadside snowbank, the bruising jerk of your seat belt. The airbags explode and the last thing you see is her terrified eyes, her hand still outstretched to you.

You come back to yourself when the car is still slowing to a stop, so you know you'd only been out for a minute or less, stunned. Your whole vision is white, and when you suck in a breath you choke on hot dust. You cough, flailing as you push the rapidly deflating cushion away from you. "Lexa?" You can hear her coughing. "Lexa!"

"Clarke," she says, and grabs your hand. "Your wrists." The dust is clearing, slowly, and you look down. Your inner wrists are red, and will sting badly, but the hurt is still distant. You're more worried about her breathing, which is starting to whistle.

"Hey," you say, trying to wave the dust away. "I'm okay." She holds your hand too tight and you try to talk her through breathing more normally until the firefighters cut your door off, Lexa ordering _her first, her first_ over your objections. You stumble around the hood of the car, slipping, and she falls into your arms. You drag her to the ambulance and strong arm the paramedic into wrapping her in a shock blanket and she's still not breathing right and your face hurts from the airbag and you can't tell if she's panicked or injured, which is making you panicked.

You text Octavia on the way to the hospital and she bursts in while you're still waiting to be seen, Raven limping behind her. Lexa goes in for an x-ray and Octavia feeds you the hors-d'oeuvres she's supposed to giving out to her guests while Raven finagles you access to Lexa's chart, which is useless because she hasn't been diagnosed yet.

Lincoln arrives from parking the car and uses his access to the sisterhood of nursing to tell you that Lexa has two cracked ribs and the shaky after effects of a serious panic attack, probes your nose with careful fingers and pronounces it unbroken. He slathers your wrists in soothing ointment and helps Lexa sign her release form. Then he squishes everyone into his van and takes you all back to Lexa's apartment because it's closest. He sits everyone on the couch and puts on a random movie.

Lexa can't stop looking at you, touching you, and you can't fault her because every second she spent in the bathroom you spent having visions of her collapsing, undetected internal bleeding stealing her from you forever. She falls asleep in your arms, exhausted and drowsy from the painkillers you made her take, and you take your first full breath since the accident. Octavia comes at you with baby aspirin and an immovable attitude and Lincoln helps you carry her to the bedroom and doesn't let you apologize for ruining his party. You see them hug each other too tight in the hallway before he ushers everyone out and tells you sternly not to go to work for the next four days.

The heat is on too high because everyone had been too shaken to remember to turn it down and you sweat under the comforter but you need to feel her breathe against you. You tuck your face in her neck and shake, minutely.

/

Lexa gets cranky because she doesn't like to admit anything hurts, ever, and you get cranky because you can't take the good painkillers and you don't understand why she's moving so gingerly until you argue again and she admits she threw the drugs away, looking guilty, and then you feel guilty because she's hurting for you, so you won't have to look at the orange bottles on the bathroom sink, and then you pick a fight about how her heater doesn't have auto-shut-off and she picks a fight about you not applying your ointment at exactly timed intervals and you both try to exile yourselves to the couch and then you fight about that. You think you've won until you shuffle to the bathroom in the middle of the night and trip over her sleeping on the floor in the hallway and it's all so ridiculous because if you really wanted to be away from her you could go to your own apartment. You kick her awake and you both sleep badly in her bed until you wake up Sunday morning and drag yourselves down to her car for brunch with your mother.

You both stand and look at her car, the keys dangling limply from her fingers. Then you look at each other. You extend your hand and she takes it, leading you back up to the couch, and you text your mother an excuse and she orders a pizza. You watch reruns of shark week and get too excited about hammerheads and when she kisses you she tastes like pepperoni grease.

/

Two weeks later you both have the day off and you go together to a car dealership and Lexa muses that she'd really like for you to drive a tank in a way that makes you suspect she's only a little bit joking.

/

Another week after that and you realize you know when her birthday is, from her chart, and it's in five days. You don't know if she doesn't celebrate because she genuinely doesn't care or if there's something dark and painful associated with the date, so you take her out two days before. You try to give her everything she usually denies herself: upscale restaurant, appetizers, expensive steak, fancy wine and mineral water for yourself, decadent dessert. She side eyes you when you present her with extravagant bouquets back at her apartment but you only have eyes for the way she smiles when she brings them close to her face and inhales.

On her actual birthday you're aggressively casual, to the point that she may be suspicious. You eat cold takeout leftovers at odd hours, chopstick fighting over the best bites, and you squint suspiciously at medical journals while she reads steadily and makes notes in the margins. You make vague offers to go back to your own apartment and she blinks at you, confused, so you give up and go change into your pajamas. You're slipping into bed with her when she starts talking, and for a single second you think she might be breaking up with you. By the time you're finished dealing with that ludicrous thought she's looking at you expectantly and you must not hide the blankness very well because she sighs, rolling her eyes, and asks you again.

You topple her over onto the bed, launching yourself in a kiss that's too enthusiastic, missing her mouth entirely as she laughs under you, her hands steady on your hips.

/

You move in together a month later and she makes you hang a confusingly ridiculous painting in the spot of honor in your new living room, some boring thing you did in college, a still life, and you don't get it but it makes her happy so it makes you happy. Then she makes you really happy, propping you up on your new dining table and eating you out until you can't remember your own name.

 **6\. how much you love her**

You'd known you were in trouble when you'd drawn her the fifth time, and resigned to being in trouble when you'd flipped through your sketchbook and seen nothing but the lines of her jaw, her strong dextrous fingers, abstract imaginings of the scars and tattoos that map her skin like poetry.

You always take your father's birthday off, so you can visit him, clean his tombstone, tell him about your life. You'd taken Lexa once and she'd greeted him solemnly, left beautiful flowers, and you'd hurt with how lucky you are, to love and be loved by her. On the anniversary of his death you usually laze around the house, try to paint something, read the book you usually don't have time for. But's a round number this year, and you're in the most serious relationship of your life with a job you love and you're good at, and it hurts more now somehow, that he'll never meet Lexa or dance at your wedding or sit on the couch and talk to you about art and music, not ever. Then you think about Finn, and how he'd loved you quietly and devotedly-most of the time, and in any case, hadn't deserved to die the way he had. So you stay in bed, indulging your grief, and sleep too early and too long.

Lexa wakes you. "Get up," she says, and you blink the sleep grit from your eyes.

"What?"

"Up." She pushes you into the bathroom and you have the most businesslike, least sexy shower you've ever had. She dresses you, rubbing a towel briskly over your skin, and marches you into the car.

She takes you to the beach. It's cold and empty and the water numbs your ankles when she pulls you into the surf. She flicks saltwater into your face until you sputter and retaliate, and you lie in the sand with your damp skin all pressed against hers. "I love you," she whispers into the curve of your ear and if you weren't already lying down it would have knocked you down, what you feel for her. A million hearts on a million sticky notes feels childish, a hundred flowers and a thousand kisses isn't enough. You want to spend the rest of your life listening to her lecture you on your suture technique and watching her eye twitch when Raven buys you a penis shaped birthday cake and feeling her body respond to yours, electricity in your fingertips when she pants your name.

"I love you," you say back to her and when she smiles it hurts, the force of your joy.


End file.
